


Heart-Shaped Stone

by seriousfic



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), James Bond (Movies), James Bond - All Media Types, Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2012-11-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 04:25:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seriousfic/pseuds/seriousfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eve is going to be the first female 00.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Heart-Shaped Stone

**Author's Note:**

> This work contains heavy spoilers for Skyfall. Beta work was done by Gran Sigma and Goodlyrottenapple.

After piloting a helicopter in Afghanistan and three years working homicide in London, MI6 picked her up. Eve took the job barely knowing why. She was fine working homicide; good at it. But hell, being a spy. You only live once, right?

 

Three months of being an analyst, qualifying on firearms and high-speed pursuits. She was good at sifting data but no great shakes. Fieldwork was where her mind was at. As soon as she heard about the section, she wanted to be the first female 00.

 

It wasn't that one saved her life when she was a little girl or anything like that. It was just that every day, she read the paper with her bran muffin and there was someone in the International section she'd love to see with a go-order on. Someone had to be the one with the license to kill. Why not her? She knew she wouldn't muck it up.

 

Her first assignment was running a safe house in Lisbon. Her and another agent, Esposito, who thank Christ was another woman, because she would not want to take her chances with a man all day in a secluded location. Her college roommate was way too into Harry Potter for a grown man. Esposito was fine, though. A little chavvy, addicted to X-Factor, but Eve was pretty sure she'd be good in a crisis.

 

Which came six months later. The section chief brought in a Quantum agent, drugged to the gills. They secured him in Room 4 while headquarters flew down an interrogator. Two hours later, his heart seized. Esposito went in for first aid; somehow, he'd slipped his bonds.

 

Eve went in after her, gun up, and found the agent about to snap Esposito's neck. He had her in front of him like a shield.

 

"Darling, darling," he said, melodically, like her ex-boyfriend on a drunk-dial. Weird, but she wasn't panicking. All she could hear was her damn ex. "Darling, I gotta go. You know I gotta go."

 

"Let her go," Eve said, projecting her voice. "I'm going to count to three."

 

"Darling, you can't keep me," he said.

 

She'd counted to three. She fired. The shot tore at Esposito's ear lobe, but landed in the man's forehead. He fell off Esposito like she was taking off a shawl. Esposito had to co-pay five hundred pounds for the surgery to fix her ear, but she didn't have one cross word for Eve. They both knew who'd saved whose life.

 

It took two kills to become a 00. One down.

 

She didn't feel guilty. He would've killed them both, had killed countless others. MI6 called it a good kill. She went through the after-action counseling like a knife through butter. That was during the day.

 

At night, she had terrors. In one dream, it would be his head that cracked back with the bullet, then it would flop forward as Esposito's, as her sister's, as M's, as herself, a hydra of recrimination. She remembered the gun bucking in her hand, feeling even slighter than it had on the firing range, but she dreamt that it never stopped. Her body quaked like tectonic plates were shifting inside her, crashing against one another, shaking her body into bits and spreading to tear the world apart.

 

She'd seen bodies in Homicide. It was different when one was hers. That was the worst part, not whatever Rubik's Cube configuration her brain forced his killing into this night, but just the difference between him dead and him alive. She'd seen both. She'd changed him. It sat under her skin with her body not able to accept or reject it. It just stayed there, a mark. She wouldn't call it a scar.

 

She'd never found out his name. It was classified above her clearance.

 

In Egypt, they assigned her to monitor listening devices in an embassy. She couldn't tell if it was a punishment or a reward. Six weeks in, she pieced together echoes from three different bugs to find a supposed translator ordering the death of an Israeli minister. 006 got a mission and Eve got a new assignment in Turkey. When Tanner briefed her, she thought of asking the name of the man from Quantum. She didn't.

 

The job in Turkey was protecting a computer. She didn't know what was on the computer. She wasn't even allowed to turn it on. She and Ronson just played Pokémon all day before giving the all-clear to M at midnight. Who would've guessed she'd meet a fellow trainer in the service?

 

One afternoon the air conditioning blew. Ronson said his old flat's AC had conked out all the time. A few parts and he'd fix it. Eve made the run. Her smartphone rang. She had it set to vibrate, which meant it was MI6. She answered and it took her brain a moment to sort through the swirl of spy jargon.

 

Credible intel, imminent security risk, condition red, secure objective and maintain maximum prejudice. It all meant that the computer was in danger and that was her problem. The code following 'agent en route' meant she had help. 007. The infamous James Bond. Even his drink order was legendary.

 

When she got back, Ronson was already dead and Bond expected her to drive. The rest was in her report. They engaged the enemy agent, pursued the objective. Followed orders, even when the order was to shoot through Bond like a bloody paper target. She watched him fall, all the way down, and felt it fill her nightmares while she was still awake.

 

"Guess you'll make 00 now, darling," her mind whispered in another dead man's voice.

 

She kept after the train, but obviously the enemy agent got off before the next station. Reinforcements couldn't help find him. They couldn't even find Bond's body. A last little insult to a great man.

 

Back in London, it wasn't good to be home. Eve went to his funeral, went to a suspension hearing where M was good enough to take responsibility for the 'agent loss,' and rented a hotel room instead of letting her parents know she was back in the country. She couldn't deal with them right now, or much of anything. And she didn't have to. All she had to do was pay the front desk every week and go to psychological counseling. It was an undeserved mercy that it was mandatory instead of her having to ask for it. And the shrink was a bit of help. He didn't ask probing questions about her childhood, trying to get to the root of her trouble with shooting her own team. He just gave her pills.

 

They turned the nightmares into incomprehensible fogs of wakefulness and sleeping. In the one she remembered, she was driving after the train again. Bond was in the passenger seat. Somehow, when she tried to look him in the eye she only saw her bullet wound and when she looked at his wound she saw his face. He wore a cheeky grin.

 

"I'm sorry," she tried to say over and over, but all that came out was the sound of windshield wipers beating at the rain. He heard her anyway.

 

"It's alright. I had this done to myself a long time ago," he explained.

 

It being a dream, she knew that she'd stashed the first corpse in the back. Darling, darling, darling.

 

The only thing that could shock her out of the gray was Mallory asking her. Bringing her back on as his assistant was either a peace offering to MI6 or a slap in the face. _I'll make the bitch who killed James Bond my secretary. What are you going to do about it?_

 

She was afraid to ask which it was.

 

The new job thickened her skin right quick. No one made it easy for her, Mallory because it wasn't his nature and the others because she'd killed their golden boy. She didn't care. They couldn't think worse of her than she did, so she did the bloody job and let them and their stares go hang.

 

She ended up redeeming herself in their eyes in what had to be the stupidest way possible. Bond just walked back into MI6. He looked the worse for wear, but she'd have expected a zombie. He was still wearing a tie! Mallory, thankfully, announced the news himself. M stayed holed up in her office, everyone trying hard not to glance at the door.

 

It was the first good news since they'd moved into the old bomb shelter, and no one held a grudge against Eve in their delirium. She actually got clapped on the back as the champagne was poured out, like she'd willed the bullet not to actually take Bond's life. She let herself have a drink.

 

Her therapist had told her she should write a letter to James, back when he was dead. She hadn't. It'd seemed too personal. They'd been acquaintances on the rare occasions they were both at headquarters, worked together for mere minutes in Istanbul, then… the train. Now she wished she'd written that letter, if only so she had some idea of what to say. She thought of pulling him aside, privately apologizing to him.

 

Even then, the rumors were circulating that his recovery process was women and wine, as the admiring males put it. She wasn't surprised. But still, she felt she owed him something, that there was something incomplete between them. Like… a blood transfusion had been started and not finished. Eve wondered if he had that same feel of absence. Or did a man like that even notice.

 

But then she saw him, wearily making his way through the underground at M's side, the loyal guard dog, now showing signs of having been kicked too many times. And she just knew he didn't care. Maybe he didn't care about anything. Sure, in the field, he'd been _engaged_ , he was _alive,_ he was _surviving_ , but take away the gun and the cars and the blood… what was he doing then? Existing? Sleeping?

 

They finally ran across each other. The sleeping dragon stirred in its sleep. She didn't remember quite what she said to him. She remembered being very cool and subtle, staring into his eyes and almost wishing he'd scream at her for putting a bullet hole in one of his impeccable suits. But it didn't make a difference to him. The chill in the air was between Bond and M; Eve didn't factor into it. She was just a weapon that'd misfired.

 

How could people see each other like that? How could they divvy a room up into people who were real and people who didn't matter? How could they judge the difference by murders and plots and _card games_? It didn't make sense to her.

 

Then he was woken up, sent back into the field. Eve couldn't shake the feeling that this was the burial, not the sparely attended ceremony in the heart of London without so much as a body for his home soil to take back. She tried to put him out of her mind, but Mallory had taken a keen interest in 007. Bond's file made its way across his desk, and therefore across Eve's. As someone who might laughably be referred to as Bond's comrade-in-arms, Mallory let her see it, wanting her insight.

 

There were thirty confirmed kills in his record. Those were just the ones that MI6 kept track of. People like Patrice or Ronson, fake people, _employees_ , they weren't asked about and Bond didn't share. And even thirty wasn't a real number, because there were rumors. When he'd first started out, Bond had practically been a rogue agent, shooting up South America like a madman. There'd been a villain found in the desert with a mouth full of oil. Everyone knew Bond had done it. No one cared.

 

Those were the kills that mattered. The ones Bond had thought about. Dwelled on. Lived with. Then, at some point, he became a company man. He stopped thinking about pulling the trigger. It stopped being his life and started being his job. And that balance, of martinis and girls and gunshots, somehow evened out. It was acceptable.

 

Eve couldn't fathom it. She read the file cover to cover and had no explanation. All she could tell Mallory was that Bond was an exceptional agent. Mallory was kind enough not to ask what kind of man he was.

 

They sent him to Shanghai and like any good dog, he tracked down his quarry. Eve was sent to rendezvous with him in Macao. It was a long flight over. She had time to think and not much to think about. Maybe Bond was right. Maybe whatever nihilistic philosophy he subscribed to made him a good agent. Was there any telling whether he was the man Britain needed him to be or just a man who needed a license to kill, drink, and put himself through hell?

 

Bond had been in Macao five hours and he'd found a hotel room that made Eve's place look like a food truck. He wasn't paying for it with MI6 funds either, so she had no idea how he'd managed it. M had called it "something of a snit" on his part, challenging them to track him, then phoning out of the blue to say he'd been in Macao.

 

She went to his room and was finally willing to admit that there was a magnetism to him. She was drawn to him. He'd killed thirty people, at least, and it hadn't caved in his soul. He was enough of a human being to fool at first glance. She wished she knew how he'd done it. A part of her was even compassionate towards the killer, the killer of killers. Whatever he was to MI6, victim or victimizer, he hadn't always wanted it. He'd tendered his resignation once. M had conveniently lost it, but the fact remained in her private notes. Either it was something M needed her successor to be aware of, that Bond had slipped out of place once and might again, or she just needed a reminder that there was a heart still beating somewhere in there.

 

Eve had asked, once. "There was a girl," M had said, and then shaken her head. It was enough to make M reach for the pack of cigarettes she kept in her safe. She'd tried to quit.

 

Eve wondered if he still saw the girl, like she did her man from Quantum. Did he see her in the women he fucked or in the ones he couldn't save? Perhaps in the mirror, still at his side? Maybe in the bodies. Death gave everyone a family resemblance.

 

They bantered a bit. Eve could do this flirting thing in her sleep, she'd been single for two nonconsecutive days in college. Maybe that was why MI6 had recruited her; they'd expected her to be some sort of femme fatale. Bond was the opposite of that, practically a target. In his own way, he seemed to leech onto any affection, drawing it out of whatever he locked eyes with, getting blood from a stone. It was a hard thing for a woman to resist. She didn't bother.

 

Of course he wasn't there when she woke up.

 

She caught up with him at the casino. Business as usual. She wasn't dissatisfied with that; she wasn't satisfied either. She didn't know what she'd wanted, just that she hadn't gotten it. Eve didn't regret the other night, she considered the possibility that he couldn't give her what she was looking for. There was a real chance no one could. The job came as a salve to that. She saved him from getting shot. He handed her a briefcase with more notes in it than her savings account. It was rarefied air she was breathing.

 

The next thing she knew, she was in a chopper, flying out to a private island to save Bond or, more likely, pick up the bodies he'd left strewn about. It turned out to be the second. She watched from her own chopper, pistol drawn, as the SAS team collared Silva and his bloodied thugs. Bond kept his gun up the whole time, aimed at the man's blond head. But after he was pulled away, Bond slumped. An alchemical change went through him. He breathed out like he was expelling poison from his body. Then he went to the body on the ground.

 

Turned out there was just one. The woman from the casino. Severine, Eve thought her name was. She went to the two of them, finding Bond crouched beside the corpse, poking at a shotglass that had fallen on the ground. It was cracked.

 

"She has parents in Kowloon," Bond said, standing stiffly. Old bones, Eve thought. Or maybe he'd taken some injuries that'd left him tender. "See to it they know she's dead. Tell them she had a good life. Make something up."

 

"How'd she die?" she felt compelled to ask.

 

"Quickly."

 

The rest was above her pay grade. Silva was put in the specialized prison in the subbasement that Eve hadn't been sure they'd ever use. Mallory and M and Bond went in with him. Eve stayed upstairs, at the other center of activity. Q branch, where the quartermaster was scouring Silva's computers for the list. He seemed to like having her around. As much as he hated to admit it, sometimes he must've liked talking to someone who didn't know all eleven Doctor Whos.

 

"Did you recognize him?" Q asked, running a search on one of Silva's hard drives. He had a bot that did it for him, but the real labor was setting up the firewalls that let them connect to Silva's systems without them exploding. Once that was done, Q just sat back and drank his tea. Eve was tempted to break out her Pokémon.

 

"Who, Bond?"

 

"No. Silva. With the hair?" Q ran a hand through his own.

 

"Why, should I?"

 

"Not really. Before your time, I guess."

 

Eve sat up straighter. "You're saying Silva was MI6?"

 

"Well, yes. Years ago, back when we were in Hong Kong."

 

"And that's not classified?"

 

"Of course it is. But I wouldn't be very good at my job if I couldn't get through my own security." Q held a finger to his lips. "He was a field operative once, but he went rogue. Started running his own game against the Chinese. Typical Neanderthal behavior. M decided she'd rather have six good agents than one bad one, so she traded him to the other side."

 

"Jesus."

 

"Good thing you took a desk job when you did," he said. "Even a 00 is expendable, but someone who can type a hundred and fifty words a minute? Priceless."

 

The elevator dinged. M and her crew were back, which meant she was needed. She hustled off, turning the new information over in her head like a rock, seeing what bugs clung to the underside.

 

The car ride to the hearing was long and awkward. Mallory had something important to get through on his Smartphone. M sat gathering her thoughts, glancing disdainfully at Mallory whenever his gadget made a ping. Eve just wondered how many people Silva had killed. How many had been enough to strip his soul away entirely?

 

"What are they saying about him?" M asked suddenly, looking over to Eve expectantly.

 

"He was one of ours. You traded him to the Chinese and now he's back."

 

Mallory looked up from his phone. "And where was this heard?"

 

"I'm sure she can't remember," M cut in. There was a shared silence where they all accepted that.

 

"I never thought there was much difference," M said at last, "between dying in battle and being sacrificed by one's superiors. Either way, it leads to a pine box." Another hesitation. It wasn't like her. "But I didn't think the man behind us would be someone I knew. It's different."

 

"Mum…do you think he was always this way or did… we… push him somewhere?" Eve asked it hesitantly. Mallory looked at her. M didn't.

 

"Of course he was this way. That's why I pushed him even further." Now she looked at Eve. "There are some people you can chisel away at. When you get down to the heart, there's solid steel. Others just leave dust. There were times I would've loved to have everyone in my employ made of steel. The thing is, once you chisel away all their protection, that steel can cut in any direction." She shook her head. "It's not such a bad thing to simply be dust in the end. Maybe the world would be a better place if there weren't any steel, on any side. And it takes a certain hardness to chisel in the first place, doesn't it?"

 

The silence was deeper this time. It only ended when Mallory put his phone away. "We're here," he said, a little ruefully. "Let's get this over with."

 

M lingered in the car a moment as he walked off. Eve waited with her. The sounds of the city were all around. Eve had fought for Britain for years now. She could count on one hand the months she'd been inside its borders.

 

"You weren't talking about Silva, were you?"

 

M made for the door. "Bond's a good soldier. Whatever else he may be is beyond my purview."

 

Inside the courtroom, MP Dowar raked M over the coals. Her rhetoric echoed Eve's own doubts enough to make her uncomfortable. M had put together an army of patriotic zealots, and for what? To lose out to more sophisticated zealots, more fanatical zealots? It was like watching two ironsides blast at each other. There was no question of the British government employing the vicious and the uncaring; just that they were inefficient.

 

The damnable thing was that it made sense. You fought fire with fire, you combated shadows with shadows. _So which am I?_ Eve asked herself, the courthouse fading to the back of her mind. _Flame or shadow?_

Darling, darling, darling.

 

Her phone trilled; she'd had it set on vibrate. The text was so bad she'd have thought it was a joke if it hadn't come directly from MI6. Silva had escaped. He was headed their way. Run.

 

Of course, M didn't. She had this look in her eyes, this damned fatigued _look_ , and it made Eve wonder which _she_ was. She'd called herself a chisel. Had she always been one, or had she broken herself against enough agents, inadequately prepared or just unfit for the job, until she'd become the bitch who decided whether they came home in a box or an airline. And decided it by who she sent out.

 

Such a woman wouldn't have much compunction about sending herself out with no return ticket.

 

Silva came in, guns blazing, and Eve felt an eerie sense of calm, picking up a gun and firing back. It was a stupid plan, honestly. Let himself get captured, escape, dress up as a policeman, and what? For the equivalent of an rioter throwing a Molotov? Eve might've laughed if people weren't dead. She could've done so much better as a criminal mastermind. She already had experience shooting 00s.

 

And suddenly it was over. The forces of evil were routed, running away, thanks to some quick thinking on the part of Her Majesty's Secret Service and some up-to-spec fire extinguishers. Without the cleansing focus on her training, of just having to shoot and reload and take cover, the chaos of it all came rushing in. People were on the floor, bleeding, screaming. Others weren't screaming. Mallory wasn't, but he was still alive, just too deadened to cry out. Maybe all the good spies were half-dead.

 

She caught Bond's eye in the confusion. He was ushering M out, a protective hand on her upper arm. It was the kind of gesture she wouldn't expect from a man like him; he could punch, he could push people along, he could even make a girl swoon with a caress. But a simple touch was hard to reconcile with him. Maybe the best spy would be half-alive.

 

He gave her a nod and she realized, absently, that she'd gained his respect or some such. And he was gone and the smoke cleared and there were bodies. How many of them were hers she'd never know. The report, the many reports there would have to be on this, might trace the bullets to her gun and told her which were fatal and which had just left someone for Bond to finish off, and who the people were that she owned now, whether they'd had kids or wives or husbands or faces, but already she was vaccinating herself against that knowledge. She'd never read it. She'd never read it.

 

Still, she'd contribute to it. One of the politicians had caught a bullet. It was just a flesh wound, but still. They'd be in this courthouse next year, still pecking over what had happened. Eve rode it out, using the adrenaline like a drug, letting it carry her away from the bodies with their silent screams. She told MI5 everything, as many times as they wanted, letting them test her for hours. It reminded her of a piano recital. She guessed she was one of the few people low enough on the totem pole for them to really work over.

 

Finally, Mallory pulled her away, saying he needed her back at headquarters. She went with him, her exhaustion chasing her down and biting down to her bone. She felt like she hadn't slept for days. Not since she'd taken that shot and sent 007 on a round-trip to the grave.  "What do you need?" she asked him. "What are we doing about Silva?"

 

"We are doing nothing. Bond's handling it. He and M have gone off the grid. If Silva wants them, he'll have to stand and fight."

 

"And where do we come in?"

 

"We," Mallory said archly, "sweep up the pieces when all's said and done."

 

"So you're just abandoning them?"

 

"I'm removing the rest of the world from the line of fire. It's what M wants."

 

"She wants to die?" Eve insisted, incredulous.

 

"She wants this to be _over._ " Mallory sighed, pinched his sinuses between his fingers, and Eve took a moment to pity him. Trying to clean up a mess that wasn't his own when God knew how many he owned. "There's nothing more to be done and you're in no shape to do anything. Get some rest."

 

"We're just going to wait," Eve said, ruefully. It wasn't a protest.

 

"It's the hardest thing there is to do. That often makes it the right thing."

 

Eve caught a nap in one of the lesser cell blocks, usually devoted to housing low-level terror suspects until they could be renditioned to the States. She went to sleep thinking about what a tiresome metaphor this would make.

 

The dream took hold of her immediately. She was the boogeyman in the closet, staring at a bed. There was Bond. He was with a girl. The girl. She was beautiful.

 

"Armor," she said, running her hand over his chest. "Armor." Like a record skipping.

 

The words of Bond's resignation, so formal, fluttered through Eve's mind like living things. _While grateful for the chance to serve my country, I feel unfit for the 00 section. Any role I play in the Secret Intelligence Service would also find me unsuitable. Therefore, I must regretfully ask that my clearance be revoked and my employment terminated. I'm not the man for the job._

"Stripped away," Bond said, cutting off the lost girl's words. "Nothing is left. Nothing is yours."

 

He coiled, his lips pressed to hers, mouth working anyway, his voice and hers: "Darling, my darling."

 

She craned her neck. The lights fell on Bond through Venetian blinds, becoming cuts in his perfect tan. She thought if she caught him from the right angle, she might see through to his soul.

 

He felt her eyes on him. Rose up, gun drawn, leaving the girl flat on the bed like a shed skin. Eve felt another gun in her hand. She aimed it at the door as Bond threw it open. The dream ended before either of them could fire.

 

Eve didn't put much stock in women's intuition, but she could feel it in the air when she woke. It hadn't gone right. Everyone was working quietly, efficiently, no office gossip or fights over lunch. Like they had become dead men walking in solidarity.

 

She had woken in time for Mallory's briefing. Silva had made another attempt on M's life. He was dead. So was M. The funeral was next week. That was all.

 

Eve knew that when M was buried, she'd have her virtues sung, her sins paved over, her real name set in stone. But this was all the remembrance she'd have wanted. A moment of quiet, of _solace_ , and then back to work.

 

She was waiting when Bond got back. He looked peaceful. Empty. She'd heard stories of how he'd been after Monte Carlo. His body brimming over with too much rage to fit inside. That was him molten, this was him forged. Cold to the touch.

 

Rust had accumulated on his heart of steel. She'd mistaken it for anger, bitterness, even humanity. It was just wear and tear. He was clean now. The real him—the person who'd written that letter—he was far beneath the metal. Merged with it.

 

She didn't try to talk to him. Not then. There was a very small part of him that needed to mourn. She knew she was the only one who'd give him the time. But after the grave and the will and the new headquarters, she sought him out on the roof. Even reached out a little. That man without armor deserved a second chance. They all did. But he turned her down, maybe without even realizing what she was suggesting. She'd known he would.

 

Britain needed men like him, if only because there were far more of the same on the other side. But she couldn't stand beside him. If there was steel under her skin, she wasn't willing to flay himself to get at it. And if Britain needed soldiers without consciences, it had more need of people who listened to theirs. Silva proved that. As did Bond, in a way. There was no doubt M had made him a good agent. But the girl had made him a great one. A heart of steel didn't survive falling two hundred feet. A beating one did.


End file.
